Paris as Sites of Queer Memories

Using Site-specific Augmented Reality for Remediating Queer Cultural Memory

The exclusion and neglect of queer histories in public spaces resonate throughout cultural memory at sites of heritage tourism (e.g. walking tours), memory institutions (e.g. museums), and public sites of commemoration (e.g. monuments and plaques). This exclusion has ongoing negative consequences for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities (collectively known as queer communities) around the world contributing to experiences of isolation, marginalization, and invalidation. The erasure of queer voices in public spaces enforces dominant narratives of heteronormativity and contributes to a lack of representation and diverse perspectives in social and political contexts. For example, Paris, France, remains a complex urban center with historical significance for queer communities, especially for queer women who lived in Paris during the Interwar years (1918-1939). This research-creation doctoral project applies both walking ethnographies and prototyping site-specific AR to facilitate a digital walking tour on queer and marginalized histories of women who lived in Paris during the interwar years. These complementary components are central to pursuing questions about queer public histories, immersive technologies, and the specificities of place.

RESEARCH TEAM

PI: Donna Langile (PhD Candidate, PI)

PhD Co-Supervisor: Fiona P. McDonald, PhD (Director of Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab, Assistant Professor Visual Anthropology, UBCO) and Emily Christina Murphy, PhD (Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies)

COMMITTEE MEMBERS

• Dr. Karis Shearer, PhD (Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, UBCO),

• Dr. Annie Wan, PhD (Associate Professor, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, UBCO)

• Prof. Victoria Szabo, PhD (external) (Professor, Art, Art History, & Visual Studies, Duke University)

FUNDING

UBC Public Scholars Initiative (2023)